Chapter 1

TWELVE YEARS LATER

“Tonight at Huddle’s Books, we are honored to have Kazuki Ono, who joins Dickens and Orwell, Kafka and Pynchon—and precious few others—as a novelist whose name has become an adjective.”

The crowd that jammed Huddle’s, a small, independent Pasadena bookstore, applauded. Many of the hundred or so fans raised copies of Kazuki’s Enrique the Freak above their heads and banged them like tambourines, the sound echoing raucously off the store’s high ceiling. Though almost giddy with excitement, the fans were careful not to drop the numbered tickets that would allow them to queue up and meet the author after he read from his latest work.

In the rear of the bookstore, Hugh drew ticket ninety-nine down his unshaven cheek. He had arrived late so as to be camouflaged by the crowd. Across the room his ex-father-in-law, Kazuki, whose sight was never good, wouldn’t recognize him—more than ten years had passed—but should he happen to walk by and see Hugh, the author known as the Lion of Osaka would surely roar. With luck, the crowd would disperse by the time ninety-nine stepped up and asked for his favor.

Since his sons’ deaths, Hugh had followed Kazuki’s work like a fly on a window pane searching for a way out, for in his fiction Kazuki might forgive the most untenable of his characters. But in all eight novels since the tragedy, there had been nothing connected with Hugh or his sons or his wife, no character’s mistake that paralleled Hugh’s horrific mistake. No message, no pardon. He had bought Enrique the Freak earlier in the day but hadn’t read a page.

He no longer expected to find consoling words—only a simple favor.

Hugh glanced down at his book and turned up the back cover. The rainbow grid that overlay the blurbs and biography framed Kazuki’s photograph, a head dominated by the mass of now mostly gray hair, though it had been freakishly blond in his youth, a rare pairing of rare genes. A face with the same bone structure as his daughter’s, Setsuko’s.

It was a resemblance that had struck Hugh wordless when he first met Kazuki nearly a quarter century ago in that quiet candlelit restaurant in Tokyo’s Roppongi District. Then, as much as now, from photos, Hugh was familiar with the narrow, fine-featured face, but he was unprepared for its luminous beauty, a light that seemed only available in cinema close-ups.

It had been five years since Hugh had seen Kazuki in person. Kazuki had appeared at this same bookstore with Sleepwalkspace, his eleventh novel. Hugh attended that night, too, listening to Kazuki read in his hesitant English, a mark of typical Japanese modesty, for, in truth, Kazuki’s English was perfect.

As on that night five years ago, Hugh had come tonight to ask Kazuki to take a letter to Setsuko, for since she’d returned to Japan, hardly a month after the tragedy, and the subsequent divorce having been decreed final, there had been no further communication between them. Hugh’s phone calls had gone unanswered, his e-mails declared undeliverable, his letters stamped return to sender, unopened. That letter too had met no better fate for on that night as Kazuki read from his novel, Hugh heard the soul-shaking voices of his sons, as if they were perched at the author’s feet, telling their story in counterpoint. Though its source a delusion, the guilt pressed Hugh’s chest like a hundred fathoms of sea and he fled, letter in hand.

Now the bookstore’s owner signaled for Kazuki, who stood at the rear of the platform, to come forward. The crowd erupted with applause as the author stepped on the stage, still looking trim and athletic at seventy. At his side, he held his novel.

Kazuki bowed several times, smiling. He closed his eyes and the applause tapered off as he stepped up to the microphone.

He began, “Thank you. During my promotional tours, I visit many large bookstores: vast bookstores, I might say. Most are part of chains, which is simply the nature of bookselling these days, and I have no complaints about the way my books are treated. But there remains something special about an independent bookstore like Huddle’s, where can be found the obscure and the masterpieces, terms not mutually exclusive. This is a house of words.”

The crowd applauded.

“Now in this house of words I would like to add a few more of my own.” He lifted his book, set it on the podium and opened it. “Enrique the Freak, Chapter One.

“I leased an apartment in the Hatsudai District. The landlord explained that as a condition of the lease, the body would be kept in the living room as I—” Kazuki paused, and then repeated his last two words as if to reassure the audience that they were hearing correctly. “—as I had been kept by the previous tenant. He would be visible, floating in liquid nitrogen in a Plexiglas chamber, but the mechanisms for his maintenance would be silent. The building’s electricity supplied power, but in the event of a power loss, an emergency generator would take over. There was no need to pay special attention to the chamber, as the dust and grit could be removed with a common household cleaner.

“Any attempt to hide or cover the body, for example when guests came over, would break the lease. The landlord advised against inviting children into the apartment—not that the children would be disturbed by the sight, but because even the best-behaved sometimes get into mischief, occasionally putting their own lives in danger . . .”

The floor shifted beneath Hugh’s feet so that he had to grab the bookshelf to steady himself.

Kazuki went on: “Any damage to the chamber would be his responsibility. He—” Again Kazuki paused, and then repeated, “He agreed, knowing he constructed this arrangement or had he was . . .”

Kazuki looked up suddenly, as if someone in the audience had jeered. He tilted back his head. His eyes danced around and his mouth fell open. As the audience murmured around him, Hugh clasped the bookcase, bracing for the targeting finger and the terrible accusation: You dare! Murderer of my grandsons!

But Kazuki said nothing. The crowd, following Kazuki’s gaze, turned their faces toward the high ceiling and a soft clapping. Above them, a seagull beat its wings as it calmly circled the assembled fans. The bird didn’t seem to be seeking a way out, and there was no sign of how it had gotten in, but though all eyes were on it, the seagull vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

Offering the crowd a bemused smile, Kazuki returned to his reading, not noticing that one of the audience, too, had gone missing.